Californians have a new privacy tool for deleting their data

The right to deletion is intriguing, but there's a practical gap most people don't realize: you need to actually know which companies have your data before you can request deletion. That's the challenging part.

I've been building in the privacy space, and the pattern I see is that people forget they uploaded documents to random services years ago (old apartment applications, one-off tax prep services, etc.). By the time you remember to request deletion, the company might have been acquired or gone under, or you can't even recall the service name.

The better approach, IMO, is treating deletion as part of your upload workflow: either use services with auto-deletion built in, or keep a personal audit log of where you've shared sensitive docs. Prevention beats remediation every time.

Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46449694

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46495220